AAOS Now, a monthly news magazine published by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), is the No. 1 nonpeer-reviewed orthopaedic publication and is No. 2 of all orthopaedic publications, including peer-reviewed journals, trailing only the Journal of the AAOS.* AAOS Now serves as AAOS’ primary communications vehicle with its members and is mailed to more than 27,000 orthopaedic surgeons across the United States and Canada.

The goal of this project was to turn an antiquated site with poor user experience into something modern and accessible. Our team consisted of the IS and Periodical departments. The application was intended for members who enjoy reading the Academy’s periodicals but want to do it in a more user-friendly way. Though this micro-site is mid-sized, there was a few areas that presented challenges. The home screen was one that prevalent. The requirement was to display content from every department. The business wanted to show enough content so that users have variety, while being mindful of clutter or information overload.

Our design team did a competitive analysis of our competitors and other websites. Parallel to the competitive analysis we interviewed our members to discover what content mattered to them the most. Based on the findings our solution was to create what we called a short list component. This short list would contain five articles. The first article displays a thumbnail, title, and description. These items were important to the member. The rest of the options would only show a title to conserve vertical space. 

My hypothesis was that if the landing page fit the users mental model it wouldn’t burden their response selection. The main article in that short list would be an option for administrators to manually populate. This manual approach allowed the possibility to promote any article of choice in the future.

Subspecialties had their own landing page where users could browse every article associated with that area. Due to constraints regarding time and budget I suggested to reduce scope. Business owners agreed and we settled with moving that functionality to phase 2.

In order to compensate for it the team decided that when a user clicks to see more articles from the home screen, they would be taken to the search page. The search page would automatically add the department filter and display every article published under that subspecialty. An easy win that paid dividends. After a series of usability tests we discovered that users understood the flow. Thus confirming the effectiveness of our decision. 

Much of the work done on this site served as a foundation for the inception of the new AAOS Design System which I named Canopy.

It was crucial to have stakeholder buy-in and agree on these components, then incorporate them as the first components in what became Canopy. AAOS Now has become one of the Academy’s top performing application.